The safe disposal of hazardous and potentially dangerous medical waste, especially sharp instruments such as syringes and scalpel blades, is a paramount concern of medical facilities where both medical personnel and patients may be exposed to a threat of injury and contracting contagious disease. As a consequence, public health service organizations, such as the Center for Disease Control, have issued advisories that containers used for such disposal must be rigid, leakproof and puncture resistant. Unfortunately, many of the medical waste material containers that are currently employed by the medical community are typically multi-piece plastic structures, usually of `snap together` construction, which not only are susceptible to leaks at their joints, but often readily come apart, spilling their contents, when subjected to `trash removal` type of handling by hospital custodial personnel. Moreover, because hospital regulations often require destruction by incineration, burning containers made substantially entirely of plastic can cause the emission of considerable quantities of toxic pollutants, such as HCl, furans ad dioxins.
With the paramount concern of the medical community and society in general of the devastating effects of the spread of diseases such as the AIDS virus, herpes and hepatitis, the potentially life-threatening shortcomings of conventional waste disposal containers have resulted in a demand for stricter regulation and control of both methods of the disposal of medical waste and improvements in the types of containers that are used for the purpose. In addition, there is a need for an economical, efficient waste device for controlling hospital/medical costs.
Advantageously, a number of these problems are addressed by the container configurations described in my previously issued U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,410,086, 4,452,358 assigned to the assignee of the present application. In particular, the use of a unitary structure of fiberboard material and the provision of coatings to prevent liquid absorption and thereby maintain container integrity and prevent leakage are detailed. As an additional feature, such patented waste container structures are provided with needle bending and removal devices that facilitate instrument disposal and minimize risk to medical personnel during the discarding of syringes.